BANGALORE: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has entered into a multi-year collaborative agreement with the Center for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD). The Hyderabad-based company is a leading R&D laboratory under the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India.

TCS and CDFD will work together in the rapidly evolving area of Bioinformatics, which is an interdisciplinary science where computational methods are used to analyze biological information. Bioinformatics will be increasingly used by pharmaceutical companies and biological research laboratories worldwide to design, develop, test, and perfect new drugs.

The Agreement envisages that TCS and CDFD will collaborate in bioinformatics and genomics-related areas. The R&D activities will be jointly conducted by CDFD and the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) of TCS located in Hyderabad. CDFD will assist TCS in developing specialized software products in identified niche areas of biotechnology. In addition, TCS and CDFD will together offer a top-quality intensive training program to TCS trainees in a bid to undertake contract research and enter into partnerships with leading biotechnology firms worldwide.

TCS will also fund some long-term R&D activities in CDFD in areas of common interest in computational biology. The areas include prediction of protein structure from primary sequence, delineation of genes and regulatory elements in genome sequences, identification of functionally important motifs in proteins, and the functional relevance of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the human population.

"Given the pace at which new biological data is being generated, extensive use of bioinformatics methods is a must in order to cope with this flood of information. We believe that pharmaceutical companies will increasingly turn to computer-based methods to assist in drug discovery", said Tata Consultancy Services executive vice president in charge of Advanced Technology Dr. M. Vidyasagar.

CDFD director Dr Seyed Hasnain said, "CDFD provides services in fingerprinting and diagnostics, and also has a strong interactive program with leading medical institutions in areas of human health, particularly in genomics of infectious diseases. Furthermore it conducts state-of-the-art research in basic biology. We have demonstrated competence in research related to both computational biology and modern recombinant DNA techniques, strengths that are perfectly complementary with those of TCS. I expect that, through this agreement, CDFD and TCS will together be able to generate intellectual property of substantial value in genomics-related areas within the next two or three years", he said.